What do the world’s most profitable companies have in common? The most successful ones like Facebook Google, Airbnb, Uber and the rest?
It’s not what they do - that’s for sure. It’s how they do it!
The single most common factor in success is habit. Creating or changing habits so users develop a relationship through habit. Interesting that most organisations do not think about the role of habit in the design of Customer Experience and when designing transformation. These organisations spend as much money on behavioural science as most companies spend on marketing.
I have read recently a lot of headlines that basically say a large number of transformation programmes fail. Headlines from 25% to 7 out of 10 say transformations fail. Although I distrust all statistics where many of them consistently reach a similar spread you have to think that something is going on.
I believe that a lot of transformations fail – just I am not really sure of how many!
BUT A LOT!
Not because of the technology or “market conditions” but because too few organisations spend enough understanding people. I am not writing this as some covert or obvious sales pitch This is about common sense based on empirical observation. Or Science as we professionals call it. Here is my model for transformation based on science. This is not methodology specific like Agile or something else. This is about adding a few bits in your systems, so the people make sense.
Because people make sense to us all the time except when we are work!
Here are a few things I observe to be true:
We can’t talk effectively about our feelings – A major part of experience
Conversations are the richest resource available to any organisation -it is designed so anyone can understand it. Most organisations don’t understand the science of Conversation Analysis. It has been around for many years it’s making revolutionary steps and it is simply the most available resource to change business outcomes.
Habits are the most powerful tool in changing culture and behaviour as a result of any transformation. If you don’t understand the role of habits in the makeup of experience you are missing the single most powerful tools used by the world’s most successful organisations. Yet they are not a standard part of customer experience design…and everyone is a customer in a transformation. All stakeholder are CUSTOMERS of your experience.
We talk about customers in really woolly and fluffy way because we use data instead of behavioural science to guide our thinking and strategy, but science and data must be more effective.
Therefore, we spend very little on behavioural science considering its importance, and that makes organisations inefficient. It provides the maximum impact and how you do transformation.....think about. I am wrong about so many things but I'm absolutely right about this. This is the Digital Transformation future. Adding more intelligence from what you can actually see and turning that continuous improvement.
Most executives do not learn about behavioural science but it produces the largest bag per buck you can get!!!!